CHAPTER X

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Marcia entered her mother's sitting-room in the midst of what seemed a babel of voices. James Coryston, indeed, who was sitting in a corner of the room while Coryston and Sir Wilfrid Bury argued across him, was not contributing to it. He was watching his mother, and she on the other side of the room was talking rapidly to her son Arthur, who could evidently hardly control himself sufficiently to listen to her.

As Marcia came in she heard Arthur say in a loud voice:

"Your attitude, mother, is perfectly unreasonable, and I will not submit to be dictated to like this!"

Marcia, staying her foot half-way across the room, looked at her youngest brother in amazement.

Was this rough-mannered, rough-voiced man, Arthur?—the tame house-brother, and docile son of their normal life? What was happening to them all?

Lady Coryston broke out:

"I repeat—you propose to me, Arthur, a bargain which is no bargain!—"

"A quid without a quo?" interrupted Coryston, who had suddenly dropped his argument with Sir Wilfrid, and had thrown himself on a sofa near his mother and Arthur.

Lady Coryston took no notice of him. She continued to address her youngest-born.

"What Coryston may do—now—after all that has passed is to me a matter of merely secondary importance. When I first saw the notice of the Martover meeting it was a shock to me—I admit it. But since then he has done so many other things—he has struck at me in so many other ways—he has so publicly and scandalously outraged family feeling, and political decency—"

"I really haven't," said Coryston, mildly. "I haven't—if this was a free country."

Lady Coryston flashed a sudden superb look at him and resumed:

"—that I really don't care what Coryston does. He has done his worst. I can't suffer any greater insult than he has already put upon me—"

Coryston shook his head, mutely protesting. He seized a pen from a table near, and began to bite and strip it with an absent face.

"But you, Arthur!" his mother went on with angry emphasis, "have still a character to lose or gain. As I have said, it doesn't now matter vitally to me whether Coryston is in the chair or not—I regard him as merely Glenwilliam's cat's-paw—but if you let this meeting at Martover pass, you will have weakened your position in this constituency, you will have disheartened your supporters, you will have played the coward—and you will have left your mother disgracefully in the lurch—though that latter point I can see doesn't move you at all!"

James and Sir Wilfrid Bury came anxiously to join the group. Sir Wilfrid approached the still standing and distressed Marcia. Drawing her hand within his arm, he patted it kindly.

"We can't persuade your mother, my dear. Suppose you try."

"Mother, you can't insist on Arthur's going through with the meeting if he doesn't wish to!" said Marcia, with animation. "Do let him give it up! It would be so easy to postpone it."

Lady Coryston turned upon her.

"Everything is easy in your eyes, no doubt, Marcia, except that he should do his duty, and spare my feelings! As a matter of fact you know perfectly well that Arthur has always allowed me to arrange these things for him."

"I don't mean, mother, to do so in future!" said Arthur, resolutely turning upon her. "You must leave me to manage my own life and my own affairs."

Lady Coryston's features quivered in her long bony face. As she sat near the window, on a high chair, fully illumined, in a black velvet dress, long-waisted, and with a kind of stand-up ruffle at the throat, she was amazingly Queen Bess. James, who was always conscious of the likeness, could almost have expected her to rise and say in the famous words of the Queen to Cecil—"Little man, little man, your father durst not have said 'must' to me!"

But instead she threw her son a look of furious contempt, with the words:

"You have been glad enough of my help, Arthur, in the past; you have never been able indeed to do without it. I am under no illusions as to your Parliamentary abilities—unaided."

"Mother!—" cried Marcia and James simultaneously.

Coryston shrugged his shoulders. Arthur, breaking from Sir Wilfrid's restraining hand, approached his mother. His face was inflamed with anger, his eyes bloodshot.

"You like to say these cruel things, mother. We have all put up with them long enough. My father put up with them long enough. I intend to think for myself in future. I don't think of Glenwilliam as you do. I know him—and I know his daughter."

The last words were spoken with a special emphasis. A movement of alarm—in Marcia's case, of terror—ran through all the spectators. Sir Wilfrid caught the speaker by the arm, but was impatiently shaken off.

Lady Coryston met her son's eyes with equal passion.

"An intriguer—an unscrupulous intriguer—like himself!" said Lady Coryston, with cutting emphasis.

Arthur's flush turned to pallor. Coryston, springing up, raised a warning hand. "Take care, old fellow!" Marcia and James came forward. But Arthur thrust them aside.

"Mother and I have got to settle this!" He came to lean over her, looking into her face. "I advise you to be careful, mother, of what you say!" There was a dreadful pause. Then he lifted himself and said, with folded arms, slowly, still looking hard at Lady Coryston: "I am—in love—with the lady to whom you refer in that unjustifiable manner. I wish to marry her—and I am doing my best to persuade her to marry me. Now you understand perhaps why I didn't wish to attack her father at this particular juncture."

"Arthur!"

Marcia threw herself upon her brother, to lead him away. Coryston, meanwhile, with lifted brows and the prominent greenish eyes beneath them starting out of his head, never ceased to observe his mother. There was trouble—and a sudden softness—in his look.

Silence reigned, for a few painful moments. The eyes of the two combatants were on each other. The change in Lady Coryston's aspect was something quite different from what is ordinarily described as "turning pale." It represented rather the instinctive and immediate rally of the whole human personality in the presence of danger more deadly than any it has yet encountered. It was the gray rally of strength, not the pallor of fear. She laughed—as she passed her handkerchief over her lips—so Marcia thought afterward—to hide their trembling.

"I thank you for your frankness, Arthur. You will hardly expect me to wish you success in such a love affair, or to further your suit. But your confession—your astonishing confession—does at least supply some reason for your extraordinary behavior. For the present—for the present"—she spoke slowly—"I cease to press you to speak at this meeting which has been announced. It can at any rate be postponed. As to the other and graver matter, we will discuss it later—and in private. I must take time to think it over."

She rose. James came forward.

"May I come with you, mother?"

She frowned a little.

"Not now, James, not now. I must write some letters immediately, with regard to the meeting."

And without another look at any of her children, she walked proudly through the room. Sir Wilfrid threw the door open for her, and murmured something in her ear—no doubt an offer of consultation. But she only shook her head; and he closed the door.

Then while Arthur, his hands on his hips, walked restlessly up and down, and Coryston, lying back on the sofa, stared at the ceiling, Marcia, James, and Sir Wilfrid looked at each other in a common dismay.

Sir Wilfrid spoke first:

"Are we really, Arthur, to take the statement you have just made seriously?"

Arthur turned impatiently.

"Do I look like joking?"

"I wish you did," said Sir Wilfrid, dryly. "It would be a comfort to us."

"Luckily mother doesn't believe a word of it!"

The voice was Coryston's, directed apparently at the Adam decoration of the ceiling.

Arthur stood still.

"What do you mean?"

"No offense. I dare say she believed you. But the notion strikes her as too grotesque to be bothered about."

"She may be right there," said Arthur, gloomily, resuming his walk.

"Whether she is or not, she'll take good care, my boy, that nothing comes of it," was Coryston's murmured comment. But the words were lost in his mustache. He turned to look at James, who was standing at the open window gazing into the garden. Something in his brother's meditative back seemed to annoy him. He aimed at it with a crumpled envelope he held in his hand, and hit it. James turned with a start.

"Look here, James—this isn't Hegel—and it isn't Lotze—and it isn't Bergson—it's life. Haven't you got a remark to contribute?"

James's blue eyes showed no resentment.

"I'm very sorry for you all," he said, quietly, "especially for mother."

"Why?"

"Because she's the oldest. We've got the future. She hasn't."

The color rushed to Marcia's face. She looked gratefully at her brother. Sir Wilfrid's gray head nodded agreement.

"Hm!" said Coryston, "I don't see that. At least, of course it has a certain truth. But it doesn't present itself to me as a ground for sparing the older generation. In fact"—he sprang to his feet—"present company—present family excepted—we're being ruined—stick stock ruined—by the elder generation! They're in our way everywhere! Why don't they withdraw—and let us take the stage? We know more than they. We're further evolved—we're better informed. And they will insist on pitting their years against our brains all over the field. I tell you the world can't get on like this. Something will have to be done. We're choked up with the older generation."

"Yes, for those who have no reverence—and no pity!" said Marcia.

The low intensity of her voice brought the looks of all three brothers upon her in some evident surprise. None of them had yet ceased to regard their sister as a child, with opinions not worth speculating about. Coryston flushed, involuntarily.

"My withers are unwrung," he said, not without bravado. "You don't understand, my dear. Do I want to do the elder generation any damage? Not at all! But it is time the elder generation withdrew to the chimney-corner and gave us our rights! You think that ungrateful—disrespectful? Good heavens! What do we care about the people, our contemporaries, with whom we are always fighting and scuffling in what we are pleased to call action? The people who matter to us are the people who rest us—and calm us—and bind up our wounds. If instead of finding a woman to argue and wrestle with I had found just a mother here, knitting by the fire"—he threw out a hand toward Lady Coryston's empty chair—"with time to smile and think and jest—with no ax to grind—and no opinions to push—do you think I shouldn't have been at her feet—her slave, her adorer? Besides, the older generation have ground their axes, and pushed their opinions, long enough—they have had thirty years of it! We should be the dancers now, and they the wall-flowers. And they won't play the game!"

"Don't pretend that you and your mother could ever have played any game—together—Corry," said Sir Wilfrid, sharply.

Coryston looked at him queerly, good-humoredly.

"One might argue till doomsday—I agree—as to which of us said 'won't play' first. But there it is. It's our turn. And you elders won't give it us. Now mother's going to try a little tyranny on Arthur—having made a mess of me. What's the sense of it? It's we who have the youth—we who have the power—we who know more than our elders simply because we were born thirty years later! Let the old submit, and we'll cushion the world for them, and play them out of it with march-music! But they will fight us—and they can't win!"

His hands on his sides, Coryston stood confronting them all, his eyes glittering.

"What stuff you do talk, Coryston!" said Arthur, half angrily, half contemptuously. "What good does it do to anybody?" And he resumed his restless walk.

"All flung, too, at a man of peace like me," said the white-haired Sir Wilfrid, with his quiet smile. "It takes all sorts, my dear Corry, to play the game of a generation—old and young. However, the situation is too acute for moralizing. Arthur, are you open to any sort of advice from an old friend?"

"Yes," said Arthur, unwillingly, "if I weren't so jolly sure what it would be."

"Don't be so sure. Come and take me a turn in the lime avenue before lunch."

The two disappeared. James followed them. Marcia, full of disquiet, was going off to find Lady Coryston when Coryston stopped her.

"I say, Marcia—it's true—isn't it? You're engaged to Newbury?"

She turned proudly, confronting him.

"I am."

"I'm not going to congratulate you!" he said, vehemently. "I've got a deal to say to you. Will you allow me to say it?"

"Whenever you like," said Marcia, indifferently.

Coryston perched himself on the edge of a table beside her, looking down upon her, his hands thrust into his pockets.

"How much do you know of this Betts business?" he asked her, abruptly.

"A good deal—considering you sent Mrs. Betts to see me this morning!"

"Oh, she came, did she? Well, do you see any common sense, any justice, any Christianity in forcing that woman to leave her husband—in flinging her out to the wolves again, just as she has got into shelter?"

"In Edward's view, Mr. Betts is not her husband," said Marcia, defiantly. "You seem to forget that fact."

"'Edward's view'?" repeated Coryston, impatiently. "My dear, what's Edward got to do with it? He's not the law of the land. Let him follow his own law if he likes. But to tear up other people's lives by the roots, in the name of some private particular species of law that you believe in and they don't, is really too much—at this time of day. You ought to stop it, Marcia!—and you must!"

"Who's tyrannizing now?" said Marcia. "Haven't other people as good a right to live their beliefs as you?"

"Yes, so long as they don't destroy other people in the process. Even I am not anarchist enough for that."

"Well," said Marcia, coolly, "the Newburys are making it disagreeable for Mr. and Mrs. Betts because they disapprove of them. And what else are you doing with mamma?"

She threw a triumphant look at her brother.

"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Coryston, jumping up. "The weakest 'score' I ever heard. Don't you know the difference between the things that are vital and the things that are superficial—between fighting opinions, and destroying a life, between tilting and boxing, however roughly—and murdering?"

He looked at her fiercely.

"Who talks of murdering!" The tone was scornful.

"I do! If the Newburys drive those two apart they will have a murder of souls on their conscience. And if you talked to that woman this morning you know it as well as I!"

Marcia faltered a little.

"They could still meet as friends."

"Yes, under the eyes of holy women!—spying lest any impropriety occur! That's the proposal, I understand. Of all the vile and cold-blooded suggestions!—"

And restraining himself with the utmost difficulty, as one might hang on to the curb of a bolting horse, Coryston stamped up and down the room, till speech was once more possible. Then he came to an abrupt pause before his sister.

"Are you really in love with this man, Marcia?"

So challenged, Marcia did not deign to answer. She merely looked up at Coryston, motionless, faintly smiling. He took his answer, dazzled at the same time by her emerging and developing beauty.

"Well, if you do love him," he said, slowly, "and he loves you, make him have pity! Those two, also, love each other. That woman is a poor common little thing. She was a poor common little actress with no talent, before her first husband married her—she's a common little actress now, even when she feels most deeply. You probably saw it, and it repelled you. You can afford, you see, to keep a fine taste, and fastidious feelings! But if you tear her from that man, you kill all that's good in her—you ruin all her miserable chances. That man's raising her. Bit by bit he'll stamp his own character into hers—because she loves him. And Betts himself, a great, silent, hard man, who has once in his life done a splendid thing!—forgotten himself head over ears for a woman—and is now doing his level best to make a good job of her—you Christians are going to reward him first by breaking his heart, and tearing his life-work to pieces!—God!—I wish your Master were here to tell you what He'd think of it!"

"You're not His only interpreter!" cried Marcia, breathing quickly. "It's in His name that Edward and his father are acting. You daren't say—you daren't think—that it's for mere authority's sake—mere domination's sake!"

Coryston eyed her in silence a little.

"No use in arguing this thing on its merits," he said, curtly, at last. "You don't know enough about it, and Newbury and I shouldn't have a single premise in common. But I just warn you and him—it's a ticklish game playing with a pair of human lives like these. They are sensitive, excitable people—I don't threaten—I only say—take care!"

"'Game,' 'play'—what silly words to use about such men as Edward and his father, in such a matter!" said Marcia as she rose, breathing contempt. "I shall talk to Edward—I promised Mrs. Betts. But I suppose, Corry, it's no good saying, to begin with, that when you talk of tyranny, you seem to me at any rate, the best tyrant of the lot."

The girl stood with her head thrown back, challenging her brother, her whole slender form poised for battle.

Coryston shook his head.

"Nonsense! I play the gadfly—to all the tyrants." "A tyrant," repeated his sister, steadily. "And an unkind wretch into the bargain! I was engaged—yesterday—and have you said one nice, brotherly word to me?"

Her lips trembled. Coryston turned away.

"You are giving yourself to the forces of reaction," he said, between his teeth, "the forces that are everywhere fighting liberty—whether in the individual—or the State. Only, unfortunately "—he turned with a smile, the sudden gaiety of which fairly startled his sister—"as far as matrimony is concerned, I seem to be doing precisely the same thing myself."

"Corry! what on earth do you mean?"

"Ah! wouldn't you like to know? Perhaps you will some day," said Coryston, with a provoking look. "Where's my hat?" He looked round him for the battered article that served him for head-gear. "Well, good-by, Marcia. If you can pull this thing off with your young man, I'm your servant and his. I'd even grovel to Lord William. The letter I wrote him was a pretty stiff document, I admit. If not—"

"Well, if not?"

"War!" was the short reply, as her brother made for the door.

Then suddenly he came back to say:

"Keep an eye on mother. As far as Arthur's concerned—she's dangerous. She hasn't the smallest intention of letting him marry that girl. And here too it'll be a case of meddling with forces you don't understand. Keep me informed."

"Yes—if you promise to help him—and her—to break it off," said Marcia, firmly.

Coryston slowly shook his head; and went.

Meanwhile Lady Coryston, having shaken off all companions, had betaken herself for greater privacy to a solitary walk. She desired to see neither children nor friends nor servants till she had made up her mind what she was going to do. As generally happened with her in the bad moments of life, the revelation of what threatened her had steeled and nerved her to a surprising degree. Her stately indoor dress had been exchanged for a short tweed gown, and, as she walked briskly along, her white hair framed in the drawn hood of black silk which she wore habitually on country walks, she had still a wonderful air of youth, and indeed she had never felt herself more vigorous, more alert. Occasionally a strange sense of subterranean peril made itself felt in the upper regions of the mind, caused by something she never stopped to analyze. It was not without kinship with the feeling of the gambler who has been lucky too long, and knows that the next stroke may—probably will—end it, and bring down the poised ruin. But it made no difference whatever to the gradual forging of her plan and the clearness of her resolve.

So now she understood all that during the two preceding months had increasingly perplexed her. Arthur had been laid hands on by the temptress just before his maiden speech in Parliament, and had done no good ever since. At the time when his mother had inflicted a social stigma as public as she could make it on a Minister who in her eyes deserved impeachment, by refusing to go through even the ordinary conventions of allowing him to arm her down to dinner and take his seat beside her at a large London party, Arthur was courting the daughter of the criminal; and the daughter was no doubt looking forward with glee to the moment of her equally public triumph over his mother. Lady Coryston remembered the large mocking eyes of Enid Glenwilliam, as seen amid the shadows of a dark drawing-room, about a fortnight later than the dinner-party, when with a consistency which seemed to her natural, and also from a wish to spare the girl's feelings, she had declined to be introduced, at the suggestion of another blundering hostess, to Glenwilliam's daughter. And all the time—all the time—the handsome, repellent creature was holding Arthur's life and Arthur's career in the hollow of her hand!

Well, she would not hold them so for long. Lady Coryston said to herself that she perfectly understood what Miss Glenwilliam was after. The circumstances of Coryston's disinheritance were now well known to many people; the prospects of the younger son were understood. The Glenwilliams were poor; the prospects of the party doubtful; the girl ambitious. To lay hands on the Coryston estates and the position which a Coryston marriage could give the daughter of the Yorkshire check-weigher—the temptation had only to be stated to be realized. And, no doubt, in addition, there would be the sweetness—for such persons as the Glenwilliams—of a planned and successful revenge.

Well, the scheme was simple; but the remedy was simple also. The Martover meeting was still rather more than three weeks off. But she understood from Page that after it the Chancellor and his daughter were to spend the week-end at the cottage on the hill, belonging to that odious person, Dr. Atherstone. A note sent on their arrival would prepare the way for an interview, and an interview that could not be refused. No time was to be lost, unless Arthur's political prospects were to be completely and irretrievably ruined. The mere whisper of such a courtship, in the embittered state of politics, would be quite enough to lose him his seat—to destroy that slender balance of votes on the right side, which the country districts supplied, to neutralize the sour radicalism of the small towns in his division.

She reached a rising ground in the park, where was a seat under a fine oak, commanding a view. The green slopes below her ran westward to a wide sky steeped toward the horizon in all conceivable shades of lilac and pearl, with here and there in the upper heaven lakes of blue and towering thunder-clouds brooding over them, prophesying storm. She looked out over her domain, in which, up to a short time before, her writ, so to speak, had run, like that of a king. And now all sense of confidence, of security, was gone. There on the hillside was the white patch of Knatchett—the old farmhouse, where Coryston had settled himself. It showed to her disturbed mind like the patch of leaven which, scarcely visible at first, will grow and grow "till the whole is leavened." A leaven of struggle and revolt. And only her woman's strength to fight it.

Suddenly—a tremor of great weakness came upon her. Arthur, her dearest! It had been comparatively easy to fight Coryston. When had she not fought him? But Arthur! She thought of all the happy times she had had with him—electioneering for him, preparing his speeches, watching his first steps in the House of Commons. The years before her, her coming old age, seemed all at once to have passed into a gray eclipse; and some difficult tears forced their way. Had she, after all, mismanaged her life? Were prophecies to which she had always refused to listen—she seemed to hear them in her dead husband's voice!—coming true? She fell into a great and lonely anguish of mind; while the westerly light burned on the broidery of white hawthorns spread over the green spaces below, and on the loops and turns of the little brimming trout-stream that ran so merrily through the park.

But she never wavered for one moment as to her determination to see Enid Glenwilliam after the Martover meeting; nor did the question of Arthur's personal happiness enter for one moment into her calculations.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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